Chelle Summer

Hattie: A Charmed Life

Michelle Rusk
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I can still remember the awful hole I felt in my life after the death of one of my grandparents on our way home after the funeral. You knew that life was different because someone wasn’t “in it” anymore.

And while that hole is still there each time there is a death (Hattie was just one of two last week as a man I know from walking the dogs at the park died from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident as well), in each loss, I have learned to ask myself what I can do with it, where I’m supposed to put it.

I didn’t see it at first, but Hattie’s death leaves a different kind of hole than I’ve experienced before.

As I have written many times before, and in my book, Ginger’s Gift: Hope and Healing through Dog Companionship, Hattie was a Hurricane Katrina dog. She was just a puppy in a rural shelter when the hurricane hit. My first husband had asked me if he could go help his friend Craig in Maine deliver supplies in a lobster truck because most everything was going to Louisiana. I told him it was fine under the condition he take dog food and bring me back a dog. Craig also adopted a puppy, one of Hattie’s sisters, and named her Lucy. She died about five years ago.

But what’s also significant about Hattie’s adoption is that Craig returned to Mississippi and twenty-some dogs out of that shelter, pretty much cleared it out, and flew them to Maine where all but the two who died found new homes. Several of them were Hattie’s brothers, too.

I had forgotten about this until Friday after she died. It’s a different world we live with social media and I sometimes forget how I share of my dogs, what I create, and what inspires me. I also didn’t think much about how many people Hattie had intersected with whether through a party at our house (she was notorious for stealing chocolate cake off low tables where people left their plates) and houseguests (she slept with you if you left the door open and if you shut it, in the morning she body slammed it until you woke up, hoping you’d let her in so she could curl up next to you).

She ran and/or walked with me almost every day of her life as long as I was home; she went places like the car wash with me; and she was just a general presence in my life. For all the writing I have done, she was usually under my desk not far from my feet as I wrote blogs and books and worked on Chelle Summer posts.

I know that I will be more than okay, and in time I’ll feel more at peace that she is doing well. It’s that separation that’s hard. She is with my family and as the last of the “original four” dogs that I had, they are together again, including her “mom” Daisy who died much too young at 5 1/2.

My grief is from that hole that will eventually scar over. I will get used to a new routine the morning, of not saying “Hattie Hattie Hattie” a bunch of times each day to her for no reason at all, and the energy in my house will eventually feel “normal” again. But letting go of a life, no matter how long as short, does leave a hole. It’s a price we pay for love.

And yet I wouldn’t trade it for anything. She and I were lucky to have each other. And share that with everyone else.